International Vegetarian Union

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Vegetarian Union held its first World Vegetarian Congress in Dresden in 1908, and the gathering included German, British, and Dutch societies along with support from fourteen other countries. But the idea for it did not begin there. It began a year earlier, in Britain, at a diamond jubilee. The question the story raises is how a single anniversary party turned into a century-long global organization. What kind of people built it, what battles did they fight inside their own movement, and what did a congress in Maine in 1975 have to do with reshaping vegetarianism across an entire continent? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Jubilee Sparks a Federation

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  In 1907, the British Vegetarian Society marked sixty years of existence by inviting leaders from vegetarian societies around the world to an international gathering. At that meeting, Georges Danjou, vice-president of the French Vegetarian Society, stood up and proposed creating a new International Vegetarian Federation. The idea did not die with the party. Albert Broadbent, secretary of the Vegetarian Society, took on the task of turning the proposal into reality. He wrote to vegetarian societies around the world, inviting them to meet in Dresden on the 18th of August 1908. When delegates arrived, three national societies sent direct representation and fourteen additional countries offered their support. Out of that gathering, Broadbent himself, Dr. Meyroos of the Netherlands Vegetarian Society, and Gustav A. Selss, president of the German Vegetarian Association, were elected to the provisional committee that would steer the new organization in its first years.

• 3. Governance and Membership

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  The International Council is the ruling body of the IVU, made up of eight elected members who each serve four-year terms. Every council member must be vegetarian and must hold a current position within a member organization. That second requirement ties representation directly to active engagement rather than honorary status. Member organizations can range from continental umbrella groups to local societies, provided their primary purpose is promoting vegetarianism and supporting vegetarian living. Groups like EarthSave sit alongside continental bodies such as the European Vegetarian Union, the Vegetarian Union of North America, and the South American Vegetarian Union. In November 1999, the IVU abolished the role of president entirely and replaced it with a Chairman of the International Council. Marly Winckler, who had served as a Congress president in 2004, later returned as IVU president from 2018 onward and is the current Chair.

• 4. What the Congresses Debated

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  Ernest Bell served as Congress president from 1923 to 1926, presiding over a period that saw the movement sharpen its boundaries. At the 6th World Vegetarian Congress, held in London in 1926, delegates put vegetarianism into unusually practical terms. Alongside food discussions, the congress featured displays of boots, furs, gloves, tennis rackets, and violin strings, all made without any animal substances. Then came a vote with no dissent: the congress decided unanimously to exclude any society that permitted fish consumption from membership. That decision drew a hard line on what the union would and would not accept as genuinely vegetarian. Three decades later, the 15th World Vegetarian Congress moved the conversation in a different direction entirely. Held in India in 1957, historians have described it as bringing together Hindu nationalism and internationalism in a way that distinguished it from earlier congresses.

• 5. The American Turning Point

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  The 1975 World Vegetarian Congress took place in Orono, Maine, and it has been called the most significant event of the vegetarian movement in the United States in the twentieth century. Its influence was felt even before 1975: the North American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1974, directly tied to the momentum the congress generated. That society eventually became one of the regional bodies that the IVU works through in North America, part of a lineage that traces back to an earlier American Vegetarian Union from 1949 and runs through several organizational renamings across the following decades. The IVU also encourages national and local bodies to run vegetarian festivals. The 43rd World VegFest was held in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, on the 25th of October 2015, one example of what the organization describes as hundreds of currently organized vegetarian festivals across many continents.

• 6. A Century of Leadership

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  The list of people who led the IVU across its first hundred years spans continents and careers. William E. A. Axon held the Congress presidency in 1909, followed by Henri Huchard in 1910 and Hugo Nolthenius from 1910 to 1913. Gordon Latto served the longest unbroken stretch as IVU president, from 1971 to 1990. Howard Lyman held the role from 1996 to 1999, the final years before the presidency was abolished. Maxwell Lee moved from Honorary General Secretary, a post he had held since 1979, into the IVU presidency in 1999 before Kevin Pickard and then Tina Fox carried it through to 2011. More recently, the IVU has added regional representatives: Rune-Christoffer Dragsdahl for Europe from 2019, Rubem da Costa Gomes for Africa from 2022, and both Thao Le for Asia and Shara Ng for China from 2024, extending the organization's reach into parts of the world that earlier leadership structures had not formally represented.